Xenonauts 2. I love XCOM, i don't love xenonauts. the first one was okay. the second one seems a bit better in some ways. At the very least it didn't crash a single time. So they got the engine down.

One thing i do like is some things are streamlined to be less OCD... (if you hire engineers they just start working, if you update your soldier 'role' templates they equip themselves with what they are supposed to equip themselves with) what i don't like is how damn repetitive playing this is (thought that's kinda the territory here, i just wish there was more variety) and how slow the R&D crawls. (Maybe my fault... shoulda added more researchers and whatnot) It's tough to get a sense of strategic balance in this game. R&D paths also are about as vague as the original games.

Ultimately, it feels not that unlike the original, and also not that unlike enough of the spiritual successor (to warrant a sequel) after about 20 hours i grew bored and just decided to enable cheat mode and finish it.

Few and far between are XCOM clones/games that really bring something new or interesting to the table. It's hard to model something like that, which is actually a lot of fun. For a while this is (the beginning with the whole narrative arc is fun) but it just gets pretty repetitive and has diminishing returns.